THE Bishop of Blackburn will not have to move out of his luxury £200,000 home - because anything smaller wouldn't do.

Church Commissioners are to tackling a cash crisis by removing several Bishops from expensive-to-maintain homes worth up to £1million.

One leading figure, the new Bishop of Portsmouth, has already been asked to leave his beautiful 200-year-old thatched home - one of the largest of its kind in England - to move downmarket.

But today a spokesman for the Bishop of Blackburn, the Right Rev Alan Chesters, said his Salesbury home - The Bishop's House - was already within the new guidelines set by the Church of England.

Communications officer Richard Steel added: "The Bishop has only a relatively modest home. It has four or five bedrooms and the kind of space he needs to entertain people. "He doesn't live in a palace. It was only built in the thirties or forties.

"If he were to move, it would have to be to a house of exactly the same size."

Several other bishops are set to lose their homes, known as See houses.

The nine palaces and 35 other homes currently occupied by the country's bishops cost £1.6million to maintain in 1994.

New guidelines from commissioners state: "It is no longer appropriate for bishops to live in such grandeur. The residences make bishops remote and unapproachable."

The commissioners say the ideal residence should have six bedrooms, a dining room seating 12 people, a room for 30 people to meet, a study, a drawing room, a sitting room solely for family use and "limited" grounds.

Properties likely to go are the Bishop of Durham's home, Auckland Castle; Hartlebury Castle, Worcester, and the Palace at Peterborough Cathedral.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.